The Bridegroom of Blood

To me, the "Bridegroom of Blood" story is the most mysterious tale in the Bible. God tells Moses that he must go back to Egypt to lead his people out of slavery. As Moses and his family journey to Egypt, it seems that God tries to kill him. One translation reads

"On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met Moses and tried to kill him. But Zipporah, his wife, took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and touched his feet with it, and said 'Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!' So he let him alone. It was then she said, 'A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.'"

Whom is God trying to kill? Why? What is a "bridegroom of blood?" Biblical scholar and author Kenneth Davis suggests that circumcision was believed to ward off demonic attack. Because Moses was presumably not circumcised, the smearing of the blood on him may have protected him as well. Others suggest that Moses' wife wasn't fond of the Hebrew rite of circumcision and had resisted it. This passage might have referred to Moses contacting an incapacitating disease that almost killed him, leaving his wife to do what was necessary. One scholar says that this episode is so difficult to understand because the biblical narrator no longer knew its real meaning. It seems to be a fragment of a once independent tradition and exhibits archaic features, such as representing Yahweh as a kind of hostile night demon, and the use of a flint knife for circumcision.

Patent application for "Resurrection burial tomb"

Godlorica frequently touches on topics relating to the afterlife. Reverend Daniel Robert Izzo has submitted U.S. Patent Application 20050027316, "Resurrection burial tomb," a novel means to revive a dead person's body from the grave. In the patent application, we find: "an artificial womb and a container with fluid having a crystal radio crown and antenna that connects to a radio and energy devices; wherein the deceased person is prevented from decay within said container and where energy is obtained from the radio crown that oscillates into the deceased person's nerves and brain... wherein part of the dead person's bone is converted into a microprocessor and computer."

A skeptic's view of God

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? For as long as pollsters have been asking the question, roughly 90% of Americans have been claiming to believe in God, and a sizable majority believes that God takes a personal interest in their lives and intervenes to help them. When President Bush said, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did," most Americans were not alarmed to learn that their leader was receiving orders that no one else could hear. America is an unusually religious nation, but even in the world's least religious nations the majority of people claim to believe in God.

Could God be detected by gravitational waves?

Frank Lee believes that gravitational waves may provide "a wealth of information about the Kingdom of God." He uses an analogy with light. Our eyes use visible light to see things. At night, when there is no visible light, soldiers may use infrared to see enemy's activities. In hospitals, x-ray is commonly used to see possible symptoms inside our body. Electromagnetic waves (e.g. light photons) are confined in our braneworld, which is a 3-D sub-universe embedded in a 10-D bulk universe. If God is some intelligent life who lives outside our braneworld, it is impossible for us to see Him by electromagnetic waves. Furthermore, the matter that constitutes the Kingdom of God does not interact with photons. Therefore, even if God enters into our braneworld, He still cannot be detected by electromagnetic waves. Lee concludes that the only possible way to see the Kingdom of God is by gravitational waves (gravitons), which also travel at the speed of light.

Monday, November 28, 2005

God's Debris: free e-book

Get your free e-book version of God’s Debris in pdf format. Why is it Free? Frankly, this is the hardest book in the world to market. When it first came out in hardcover, booksellers couldn’t decide if it was fiction or nonfiction. Was it philosophy or religion? It’s a religion/science book written by a cartoonist, using hypnosis techniques in the writing. It’s a thought experiment. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read. How do you sell something that can’t be explained? Imagine that you meet a very old man who knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense.

Building a universe that doesn't fall apart

Many modern novelists, philosophers, madmen, and provocateurs deeply believe that time is not what we think it to be. Novelist Philip K. Dick, for example, suggested that time on Earth has stopped in the year 50 A.D., and he gives concrete reasons for his theory in his breathtaking essay "How to Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later." In short, he believes that our world today is not taking place in the 21st century, and we are deceived and live in a counterfeit reality lodged in a spacetime pocket in 50 A.D. He writes:

My theory is this: time is not real.... Despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.... [There is] internal evidence that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change... and we can cut through to it.... Thousands of years pass, but the world of the Bible is concealed beneath it, still there and still real.

To Dick, the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing but usually hidden from our sight. Although Dick realizes that modern scientists would scoff at his seemingly insane assertions, he promotes his odd world view as a useful metaphor for the difficulties human have when trying to comprehend reality. Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself."

Mysterious entity: "The Aphex Face"

Researcher discovers "The Aphex Face," a mysterious entity, in a spectrograph (visualization of the sound spectrum)....

For several years, people have wondered about the mystical significance of the "Aphex Face," a haunting image found in an acoustical analysis of sound. Some called it a "hidden demon face" and gave it a religious significance. Others said it was somehow intentionally embedded in the sound as a prank. You can see the face for yourself here:http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/aphex_face.jpgAnd you can read about the explanation for the face here:http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Patent for game that models heaven and hell

United States Patent Application20050212207

Edward Gilhooly patents a "game board apparatus" having a game board horizontally divided into two sectors representing heaven and hell. The start position is at the bottom of the hell and the finish winning position is situated at the top of the heaven. The players use playing pieces to traverse spaces in the heaven and hell sectors, the amount of advancement being dictated by indicia provided on decks of question cards and answer cards.

Do space aliens have souls?

Do space aliens have souls? Inquiring minds can check Jesuit's book.

Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world. But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation? Curious Catholics need not be space buffs to want answers to these questions and others when they pick up a 48-page booklet by a Vatican astronomer.

On the Fast Track to "The Rapture"

Increasing natural disasters are raising the rapture index, leading some Christians to believe the Second Coming is near. Whether you see earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis as natural disasters or acts of God, this has been a bad year for the world and a good one for the rapture index. The index, a feature on the Web site http://www.raptureready.com/, is a measure of how quickly the world is careening toward the Second Coming of Christ. On a good day, it claims 15,000 hits.

Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study

We must get another idea out of our heads also, which is thinking about the ark as a floating "zoo". The more appropriate analogy is that of modern intensive livestock confinement, where animals are raised in the minimum possible space with the maximum amount of labor saving devices employed. The ark was not intended to be an enjoyable experience for the animals (or the people!). It was, rather, a temporary captivity in which the only thing to be achieved was simply survival in reasonable health. There are many things that are doable for one year with survival as the only goal, that could not be sustained for a long period of time. The three main ingredients for survival are 1) a place to stay, 2) sufficient food, and 3) sufficient water. Woodmorappe has calculated how much of the ark was needed to support each of these. A little less than one-half of the floor space was needed at a minimum to house the animals. Food in the form of hay, dried fruit, dried meat, and dried fish occupied up to 12% of the ark volume. Most of the food was hay, compressed or possibly pelletized to take up less space.Read more:http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/ark/index.htm

Intelligent Design

Victor Stenger says: The odds against DNA assembling by chance are 10^(40,000) to one [according to Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space,1981]. This is true, but highly misleading. DNA did not assemble purely by chance. It assembled by a combination of chance and the laws of physics. Without the laws of physics as we know them, life on earth as we know it would not have evolved in the short span of six billion years. The nuclear force was needed to bind protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms; electromagnetism was needed to keep atoms and molecules together; and gravity was needed to keep the resulting ingredients for life stuck to the surface of the earth.

Dreams and the Near-Death Experience

A connection to the afterlife

Mellen-Thomas Benedict has some wonderful insights about dreams and the near-death experience he had. He states, "When I recovered, I was very surprised and yet very awed about what had happened to me. At first all the memory of the trip that I have now was not there. I kept slipping out of this world and kept asking, "Am I alive?" This world seemed more like a dream than that one. Within three days, I was feeling normal again, clearer, yet different than I had ever felt in my life. My memory of the journey came back later ... What happens when we dream? We are multi-dimensional beings. We can access that through lucid dreaming. In fact, this universe is God's dream.